Apple Steve Jobs Top Powergeek
When Web 2.0 Meets Information Infrastructure
Ever had that needle in a haystack feeling when looking for your own personal information or scouring for corporate data or files?
The Next Wave: Yelp
The Next Small Thing
BusinessWeek writer Catherine Holahan explains what a widget is. She shows how widgets make their way across the Web and appear on users' blogs and social network pages.
Bits of code called widgets open the door to viral marketing across social networks. Silicon Valley sees them as a Web revolution in the making
With widgets, any page on the Web can be your point of sale. Marketers met at a conference to figure out how to spread them far and wide
ThumbStrips is a Firefox plugin that records a filmstrip of screenshots.
The plugin comes from Intuit’s Innovation Lab
ThumbStrips records a filmstrip of a users browsing session to make it easy to return to and share pages a user has visited. The plugin was developed after observing people struggling with the back button and history lists. A sharing component supports collaborative search or people doing research projects, trying to share with each other where they’ve been and what they found there.
Web 2.0 Awards-2007
SEOmoz's team reviewed hundreds of sites in the Web 2.0 sphere to uncover the best in each of 41 categories.
Social Networking Websites
Why are there all of a sudden so many social networking websites popping up like the rain drops in a rainy season. According to a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project survey more than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites.
Within a search of two minutes I found the following websites:
This WikiPedia link has a massive list of social networking websites.
All these websites provide business and social networking and interaction tools. And if you believe the trend, many of these websites are great hits among the young as well as the professionals. Amazingly, some of them are outright silly. Take for instance Twitter. It beats logic why people would even visit the website, leave alone use it for leaving ultra-boring messages. An average MySpace page is so gross to look at.
Some SEO experts are already suggesting you to invest your time on these websites to generate quality traffic to your websites and blogs? But is it really worth it? Depends on what sort of traffic you want and how much spare time you have got. If you are a big company or a rich entrepreneur, sure you can hire someone to interact on these websites on your behalf because extra traffic doesn’t harm (if you can bear the bandwidth cost). But if are a one-man-woman team then every minute you spend promoting your service is precious. Maintaining social networking website can easily turn out to be a time consuming affair.
Social networking websites, if used correctly, can definitely help you build brand awareness and create the right buzz for your service or product, especially for services and products that would appeal to the frequenters of these websites. The power of social media websites lies in the massive amount of traffic they generate. Currently numerous films and other entertainment programs are being promoted through various social media websites.
Road Warriors Web 2.0
For those who are looking for ways to never overpay for a flight again, try out these services:
Farecast.com is the first airfare prediction website. They help online travel shoppers save money by answering the question; should you buy now or wait? Farecast now offer airfare predictions from over 75 U.S. departure cities to top domestic destinations.
This site focuses on building new product features that will help travel shoppers make more confident and smarter airfare purchase decisions.
FareCompare.com wants to improve the current shopping process by providing relevant information to consumers in a timely fashion.
They receive and process fares directly from the airlines. Each fare shown is a valid fare on that airline. Unfortunately, sometimes inventory (seats) is limited/unavailable for the selected fare on your selected dates. On average each airline files from 10-20 fares between any two cities.
Yapta's purpose is to make it easy for you to secure the best airfare deals available on the Web. They do this by giving you a tool to "tag" the trips you like while shopping online, then Yapta tracks prices on these trips and alerts you when prices drop. Yapta also gives you a single place to keep all of your trips online. It's a pretty simple concept, but for some reason, no one has done this before.
Web 2.0 Applications
Here are a few popular Web 2.0 applications. Not to worry, I'll bring you more later on.
Allmydata
Allmydata harnesses the power of grid storage technology to securely store your email, photos, music, movies and more.
Backpack
Make a page out of an idea. Then add free-form text, to-dos, notes, photos, files. Share pages with other people. Set email and mobile phone reminders so you don't forget.
BlinkList
Import and manage Your Bookmarks - in the Blink of an Eye. Create Watch lists to See What Your Friends Are Discovering Online. Follow the Wisdom of Crowds and Discover What's Hot Now.
clipmarks
Clip and save just the stuff you want from any web page. Create your personal online collection of clipmarks. Tag them with keywords, add your own comments and share them with friends. Search the Public Clipmarks to see what's being clipped and who is clipping it.
Kiko
Slow, featureless online calendars are so Web 1.0. Kiko is a cool new web calendar that delivers all the functionality of desktop calendar software, and all the convenience of online access. And it's free!
Second Life Copyright Infringement Clam Heads To Court
According to Reuters
Second Life user Volkov Catteneo is alleged to have copied and distributed the “SexGen Bed”, an item that sells for L$12,000 ($45.11). The lawsuit seeks to force Linden Lab to disclose Catteneo’s real-world identity, as well as asking Catteneo for damages.
The case, the first of its kind for Second Life, will be interesting from a legal perspective. There is no legal precedent for the case, and as Stanford University’s Lauren Gelman said in a Four Corners report earlier this year
“All of this is virtual bits and bytes, ones and zeros that are sitting on the servers at Second Life’s headquarters and the server farms they have around the world…how much can you own something that’s really under the control and domain of another party, this is really where the law is being tested to see how they’re going to figure that out.”
On the surface it also seems a little strange that Linden Lab has not already dealt with it; Second Life has strict rules in relation to copyright infringement and has previously acted in favor of in-world copyright owners.
Trendmill: Clothes Darling, Clothes!
Trendmill allows users to upload images of their own clothes or clothes they wish they owned. Members are able to “tip people off” on what they think is hot, vote on other people’s clothes and collaboratively “give a general sense of what the next big trend in fashion is going to be”.
Trendmill also provides the usual features expected from a social networking site, including messaging, publishing articles (blogging) and connecting with friends (”entourage”).
NBBC Joins The Deadpool
The remains of NBBC will be merged into the NBC/ News Corp joint venture first announced in March.
The new service, dubbed Clown Co has long been discussed but to date is yet to appear. Strangely, News Corp recently launched , a YouTube competitor in its own right that will compete directly with the NBC/ News Corp joint venture.
In an interview with MediaPost
The closure of NBBC and the transfer of IP and talent does not extend to existing agreements. Over 150 partners of NBBC, including Hearst, A&E Television Networks, The Horror Channel, Vibe Media Group, CNET Networks and Forbes.com will be required to negotiate new contracts with the new service.
iPhone blog
Go to CNET's blog site devoted to the iPhone. There you can stay up to date on the newest applications that you can download.
Firefox 3 Alpha 6 now available
Mozilla has released the sixth alpha of Gran Paradiso, Firefox 3 development name. This release comes with a very short delay to the original schedule which is an important achievement considering Alpha 5 was delayed for about a week.
Is IBM Making Enterprise Mashups Respectable?
Here's a great article on how IBM is embracing the use of mainstreaming mashups and Web 2.0 technologies.
Mobio Launches New Mobile Social Media Widgets
Mobio Networks announced today that are launching new mobile social media widgets for Web 2.0 services Twitter, Digg and Kaboodle as part of their GetMobio lifestyle portal. Mobio has created 50+ mashups that help people stay connected with friends, places and information while mobile.
25 New Apps for Your iPhone
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Nine Cool Things You Can Do With Wikipedia
Wikipedia is great encyclopedia, but did you know you could also use it as a future planner, TV guide, zeitgeist trend tracker, and more?
New Version of Plaxo Launched
Automated “multi-way sync” under Plaxo 3.0 includes Google Calender, Microsoft (Outlook, Outlook Express, Vista Mail, and Hotmail), Yahoo (Mail and Calendar), Mac OSX (for Address Book, iCal, and iPhone), AOL (AIM and Classic AOL), Mozilla Thunderbird and LinkedIn. The new multi-component “smart address book” web app includes tabs for contacts, calendar, tasks, notes, and more. A revamped address book component includes click-to-call phone numbers via Jajah and maps from Yahoo.
Search for Billions of Photos
The new plug-in gives users of participating web sites the ability to search for billions of publicly stored photos, videos and images from Photobucket’s extensive library, along with access to their own content from existing Photobucket media accounts, all without leaving partner sites.
Photobucket Media Plug-in 2.0 partner sites include: Freewebs, Gaiaonline.com, LiveJournal, Piczo, Rockyou.com, Singshot, Slide.com and Tagged.com.
Photobucket CEO Alex Welch said that by adding search to Photobuckets Media Plug-ins will deliver a more compelling service option for Photobucket’s partners.
A Happy Reminder
Ikan is a special bar code scanner you can use to keep your grocery shopping list up to date. As you use items, simply scan them before you trash them to keep a running tally of what you’ve used. It also has a voice recorder you can use to add non-coded items like apples and oranges.
Your list is saved to the internet, where you can review and print out your list or ship it off to an online grocery store to complete your order. Because the list is on the net, you can even review it on the go from a mobile browser.
New Rules for Social Media Optimization
There is an exceptionally interesting meme developing around the idea of social media optimization. It started with Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations and his 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO).
Read the article here.
Create mashups in minutes. With openkapow you can quickly create, deploy, share and use web services (called Robots) that masups anything on the web.
Star Wars Mashups
Upload your videos and mash them with classic Star Wars scenes, special effects, and music. Add transitions and titles, then share your video.
High Stakes Countdown
The Healthy, Hip High-Tech Home
Today's decked-out domiciles are big on gear that helps you get a good night's sleep, keep the germs away, and stay fit.
How can Web 2.0 contribute to development?
Kiss Boring Interfaces Goodbye With Apple's New Animated OS
When Steve Jobs takes the stage Monday [June 11th] at Apple's programmers conference, he's likely to give the world a glimpse of an upgraded Mac operating system that could herald the biggest changes to the machine's interface in 30 years.
Maestro: Social Music Streaming
Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services
Foleo
As rumored, the big new device that's Palm's Jeff Hawkins has chosen to announce at the D conference today is the Palm Foleo, which the company is billing as a "mobile companion." Boasting a 10-inch widescreen display and a full-size keyboard, the device is intended to be used in conjunction with your smartphone, with any edits to documents made on one device automatically reflected on the other thanks to the device's Bluetooth connectivity.
See additional pictures of Foleo.
Mahalo is the world's first human-powered search engine powered by an enthusiastic and energetic group of Guides. Guides spend their days searching, filtering out spam, and hand-crafting the best search results possible. If they haven't yet built a search result, you can request that search result. You can also suggest links for any of our search results.
eBay confirms StumbleUpon acquisition
eBay released a statement on Wednesday afternoon confirming that, as speculated, it has acquired Web site discovery service StumbleUpon. The price, according to eBay, is approximately $75 million.
eBay's most famous acquisition is arguably Internet teleTwitter Blog Site
A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web! Check out Twitter's blog.
Note: Twitter is Micro-blogging. Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that lets you write brief text updates (usualy less than 200 characters) about your life on the go and send them to friends and interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging, email or the web.
Schmap!!
Schmap is a leading publisher of digital travel guides for 200 destinations throughout the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The innovative technology behind Schmap Guides is also used by clients, partners and bloggers to power schmapplets – a range of fully customizable map mashups and map widgets. Founded in 2004, Schmap is privately owned and based in Carrboro, North Carolina.
Know Where? Your Phone Does
With WHERE™ GPS widgets, you drag widgets like your local weather forecast, earthquake reports, roadside assistance, local ski reports, store finders and more from the web to your handset, or discover them directly on your phone.
Full Flexible screen by Sony
On May 24, Sony unveiled what it is calling the world’s first flexible, full-color organic electroluminescent display (OLED) built on organic thin-film transistor (TFT) technology. OLEDs typically use a glass substrate, but Sony researchers developed new technology for forming organic TFT on a plastic substrate, enabling them to create a thin, lightweight and flexible full-color display. The 2.5-inch prototype display supports 16.8 million colors at a 120 x 160 pixel resolution (80 ppi, .318-mm pixel pitch), is 0.3 mm thick and weighs 1.5 grams without the driver.
According to Sony, which plans to release a new line of miniature TVs this year and is bolstering efforts to develop next-generation flat-panel OLEDs, this new technology will lead to the development of thinner, lighter and softer electronics.
The company is scheduled to present the results of its research at the SID 2007 International Symposium now underway in the US.
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Polymer Vision: Organic based rollable displays
Polymer Vision announced its cooperation with Innos to establish the world’s first production facility for organic semiconductor based rollable displays. Manufacturing will start this year to meet the increasing commercial demand for the unique Polymer Vision display technology.
» polymervision.com / PDF downloadWhat will Web 3.0 look like?
Just in case you missed it, the web now has version numbers. Nearly three years ago, amid continued hand-wringing over the dot-com crash, a man named Dale Dougherty dreamed up something called Web 2.0, and the idea soon took on a life of its own.
Wireless for the Clueless
Wireless, we keep being told, is the wave of the future. It's the next big thing. After all, the San Jose, California research firm Infonetics estimates that the market for WLAN hardware (that's equipment for wireless local-area networks) will grow to approximately $2.3 billion by 2005.
World's Thinnest Laptop
Codenamed the Intel Mobile Metro Notebook, this prototype was designed by Intel along with Ziba Design, and it's a mere .7 inches thick and weighs just 2.25 pounds. See it here.
7 Ways to Send Huge Files: 25X Bigger than Gmail
Gmail users can now send up to 20MB of attachments to each other. But we want more! Here are 7 awesome services that let you send files of more than 500MB.
Yugma is a free web collaboration service that enables people to instantly connect over the internet to communicate and share content and ideas using any application or software. Whether you are on a Windows, Mac or Linux, you can connect on-demand and real-time with friends, family, clients, or employees whether they are across the city, nation or even the globe.
Diggnation
Diggnation is a weekly tech/web culture show based on the top digg.com social bookmarking news stories.
Companies Think of Clever Ways To Draw Young Talent
Justin Wong, an aerospace engineering student from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was schmoozing on Facebook.com last fall when he came across a sleek Boeing job ad.
Campaigns Tread Carefully Into Web 2.0
Presidential hopefuls starting to use blogs, social networking sites to advance their cause.
Cisco Steps Up Consumer Push
CEO Chambers is readying a souped-up set-top box as part of the networking company's deepest push yet into the living room.
Online Video Gets Real
Not all video is good video—that's why editors were created. But a good video-editing package can cost hundreds of dollars and take weeks to master. Fortunately, there's a new generation of video-sharing sites that include free video-editing tools.
Here are a few:
Eyespot beta (www.eyespot.com)
Not only does Eyespot let you upload and edit your video online, it also encourages the use of free public-domain and open-license material. To edit a video, you simply drag and drop clips into a timeline. To trim a sequence, Eyespot indicates start points with a bright-green arrow and end points with a red arrow, a method so simple it puts every other video editor to shame.
Grouper (www.grouper.com)
Notable primarily because it was purchased by Sony last summer, Grouper takes a unique approach to helping users edit their efforts. Rather than having them perform edits online through a browser application, Grouper offers a free editing program for download. Unfortunately, the Windows program leaves a lot to be desired.
Jumpcut (www.jumpcut.com)
Recently acquired by Yahoo!, Jumpcut was clearly designed with bloggers in mind. Its lucid online video-editing program is useful and trouble-free, and the site offers lots of options for getting your message online.
Motionbox (www.motionbox.com)
Taking a no-muss, no-fuss approach to editing videos, Motionbox emphasizes sharing "the good stuff." In other words, it lets people cut out the dead, dull, and dopey parts of their videos quickly online so that the audience doesn't get bored.
YouTube founders unfazed by challenges
The media's recent legal and competitive challenges to Internet video pioneer YouTube haven't fazed co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who have diligently sought to make money for new owner Google Inc., as well as the creators of the content that fuels their Web site's whirlwind growth.
Web 2.0 is led by technology geeks
Web 2.0. So what does it mean? Basically it is a new way of designing websites based on new ways of coding (like Ajax), new designing techniques that use advanced CSS and “pure” layouts (more spaces, nice logos, brand oriented) and also probably on the feeling of community.
Top Tools to build a web 2.0 app from scratch: the ultimate guide
You have a brilliant idea and want to bring it to life through a nice web 2.0 application on the web. In this guide, we suppose you already have access to a dedicated or shared server.
The Digital Incubator program, now in its second year, was developed jointly by mtvU and Cisco to discover talented college students to create new media and entertainment concepts. Together, they provide the monetary, creative and technical resources for students to bring their digital media ideas into reality…as well as a national platform for the finished products to be showcased. The Digital Incubator program wants to encourage the next generation of talent to experiment with new forms of story telling made possible because of video and broadband coming together and mtvU reaches a college audience that is consuming media in new and exciting ways. mtvU and Cisco are happy to announce our 2007 grant awards.
Build online applications by dragging and dropping
A simple, powerful new way to create web-based business applications that can be used by anyone, anytime, anywhere! Coghead is the one do-it-yourself web application platform that can handle all of your projects from beginning to end.
Amazon opens a music store
Amazon dropped the bomb today by announcing its DRM-free music store.
Digg, Reddit, Netscape: The Wisdom of Crowds or Mob Rule?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals" - "K," Men In Black
Welcome to Inside Silicon Valley
Welcome to a new weekly podcast from the Mercury News and PodTech.net. Each week, they’ll help you understand what makes Silicon Valley tick, with news and interviews with entrepreneurs and established tech companies.
For their first show, they visited Brickhouse, the new idea incubator that Yahoo recently opened in the trendy South Park neighborhood of San Francisco. Yahoo is hoping that this new campus will evoke a start-up vibe and spur innovation within the company. Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz explains how it will work.
Pew Research on tagging
Pew Research Center: Tagging Play is a short report looking at who tags content on sites like Flickr, YouTube, Del.Icio.Us and the others.
I’d strongly recommend reading the brief report. There are some basic demographics in the report and short piece on what tagging means.
A December 2006 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 28% of internet users — and 7% on any typical day — have tagged or categorized online content such as photos, news stories or blog posts.
Grouptivity Pulls Social Bookmarking Card
Grouptivity launched an updated version of its content-sharing tool on Monday. Blog posters can now add a "discuss this" button on the bottom of any post, which will pull up the Grouptivity sharing dialogue to send off the post or article to others. This dialogue allows you to pick from various pieces of media (photos and videos) that you want to share, along with a full text copy of the content. There's also the option to send it off to multiple e-mail addresses, set up read confirmations, and author explanatory messages to your recipients.
Firefox Does Twitter: Twitbin
Twitbin is a small Firefox extension that puts a Twitter sidebar inside your browser. Once you've logged in with your Twitter credentials, it keeps tabs on your friends or public Tweets. You can also write new posts right from the sidebar.
To toggle the Twitbin sidebar on and off, there's a bird logo that shows up on your browser next to the home button. The sidebar has its own links, for switching back and forth between friends and public feeds, and a refresh button to update posts. If you're not interested in manually hitting the refresh button, Twitbin can be set to automatically refresh all the posts every 1, 5, or 10 minutes.
To toggle Twitbin on and off, there's a handy button installed on your browser.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Twitbin is not without its snags. For example, when typing there's no character limit warning to let you know how much room is left; instead, it just cuts off once you've hit 140 characters. Likewise, the typing interface only gives you a single line, so you can't see what you've written about without scrolling back and forth.
Twitbin is free and maintains that no-cost aspect with advertisements; you'll see a small ad on the bottom of the sidebar. It's fairly unobtrusive, and in place to pay for the development team's server costs.
Compared to some of the other Twittering solutions out there, Twitbin is very similar to Tweetbar in its use and integration with Firefox. Tweetbar also works with the Flock browser. For other ways to use Twitter, check out our Newbie's guide or our post on six ways to improve Twitter.
Web 3.0 and SEO
Phil Wainewright first used the term “Web 3.0” nearly a year ago, and to date the concept has been even more difficult to pin down than Web 2.0 was when it was first coined. Already the term attracts controversy, with Wikipedia barely mentioning it except to say that there is not “sufficient consensus from the community of Web designers to justify the creation of a new term to describe the next generation of the Web.” Is it real, and what does it mean for SEO?
Wiki
What is it? A wiki is a website that allows visitors to add, remove, and edit content.
A collaborative technology for organizing information on Web sites. Wikis allow for linking among any number of pages. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for masa collaborative authoring.
One that I like is Jotspot. Below are links that provide information about Jotspot.
Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices
Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices What does Web 2.0 mean for your company?
Additional information about Web 2.0 by Tim O'Reilly.
Comparing 5 Ways to Tag Videos
There's so many videos flying around online these days and both the sheer number and impact of those videos are only going to increase with time. Video tagging tools let you archive and share favorites, subscribe to video tag feeds in iTunes or display tagged videos on a webpage using SplashCast.
Joost Announces $45 million Funding From Sequoia, Index, CBS & Viacom
The company has not previously disclosed any financings. Joost was started by Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström in 2006; presumably seed funding came directly from them.
Apple Filing reveals multi-sided iPod with Touch Screen Interface
Apple Inc. is looking to patent a design for a handheld device (or iPod) that displays its output on a small front-side display screen but receives input through a larger touch- and force-sensitive back-side interface, AppleInsider has discovered.
How to Get Started using RSS
RSS has become a valuable technology for everything from casual web users to webmasters. According to a recent Yahoo survey only 12% of internet users are aware of RSS and a mere 4% have knowingly used RSS. RSS exists as a means to gather and display information quickly and easily. By the end of this article, you should know what RSS is and how to use it to make your life easier.
